P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002
Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3, Fall 2004 ( C 2004)
THE THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY AS AN ADAPTABLE TREATMENT MODALITY ACROSS DIFFERENT SETTINGS
David Kennard
Simple core statements of the therapeutic community as a treatment modal- ity are given, including a “living-learning situation” and “culture of enquiry.” Applications are described in work with children and adolescents, chronic and acute psychoses, offenders, and learning disabilities. In each area the evolu- tion of different therapeutic community models is outlined. In work with young people the work of Homer Lane and David Wills is highlighted. For long term psychosis services, the early influence of “moral treatment” is linked to the revitalisation of asylums and the creation of community based facilities; acute psychosis services have been have been run as therapeutic communities in both hospital wards and as alternatives to hospitalisation. Applications in prison are illustrated through an account of Grendon prison. The paper also outlines the geographical spread of therapeutic communities across many countries.
KEY WORDS: therapeutic communities; children; psychosis; prison; learning disability.
The author is Head of Psychological Services, The Retreat, York, England. Address correspondence to David Kennard, The Retreat, York, YO10 5BN, United Kingdom; e-mail: [email protected].
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This is a paper about different adaptations of the basic therapeutic community idea. A detailed account of the principles and practice of therapeutic communities associated with the work of Maxwell Jones (1) and Tom Main (2) is given elsewhere. For our purpose it may help to have in mind a few simple core statements that mark out the com- mon ground of this treatment modality, but which allow for the vari- ations found in applications in different settings and with different populations. “What distinguishes a therapeutic community from other compa- rable treatment centres is the way in which the institution’s total resources, staff, patients, and their relatives, are self-consciously pooled in furthering treatment. That implies, above all, a change in the usual status of patients” (1, pp. 85–86). The therapeutic community is a “living-learning situation” where everything that happens between members (staff and patients) in the course of living and working together, in particular when a crisis occurs, is used as a learning opportunity. Permissiveness is one of the four principles identified by Rapoport (3) and is perhaps the most central of the four: that all members should tolerate from one another a wide degree of behaviour that might be distressing or seem deviant by ordinary standards. There is a “culture of enquiry,” a phrase that highlights the need not only for efficient structures but for a basic culture among the staff of “honest enquiry into difficulty,” and a conscious effort to identify and challenge dogmatic assertions or accepted wisdoms. The basic mechanism of change can be described as this: the ther- apeutic community provides a wide range of life-like situations in which the difficulties a member has experienced in their relations with others outside are reexperienced and reenacted, with regu- lar opportunities—in groups, community meetings, everyday rela- tionships and, in some communities, individual psychotherapy—to examine and learn from these difficulties. The daily life of the ther- apeutic community provides opportunities to try out new learning about ways of dealing with difficulties.
CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
Therapeutic communities for children and young people go back at least 90 years, to the founding of the Little Commonwealth by Homer Lane in 1913. Lane was an American who had experience as an educator at the George Junior Republic, a reformatory system developed in the P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002
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United States, and was invited to advise on the setting up of a home for delinquent adolescents in Dorset in south west England. For 5 years the Little Commonwealth housed around 50 youngsters, mostly aged 14–19, who participated in a carefully structured system of shared re- sponsibility. Lane wrote that
the chief point of difference between the Commonwealth and other reformatories and schools is that in the Commonwealth there are no rules and regulations except those made by the boys and girls themselves. All those who are fourteen years of age and over are citizens, having joint responsibility for the regulation of their lives by the laws and judicial machinery organized and developed by themselves. The adult element studiously avoids any assumption of authority in the community, except in connection with their duties as teachers or as supervisors of labour. (The individual and the whole community are free) to make mistakes, to test for themselves the value of every law and the necessity for every restraint imposed on them (4).
This remarkable venture ran for 5 years but came to a premature end after two young female “citizens” claimed that Lane, who had become an enthusiastic proponent of psychoanalysis and was attempting to apply it in the community, had immoral relations with them. However his innovative work inspired the educational pioneer A S Neill who founded Summerhill, and who in turn influenced the whole progressive school movement. The term therapeutic community was not applied directly to resi- dential work with children until the 1960s. However from the 1920s onwards a number of residential schools and projects for seriously dis- turbed or “unschoolable” children, which had many of the key fea- tures of therapeutic communities, were created by charismatic figures. These included Leila Rendell (Caldecott Community), George Lyward (Finchden Manor), Otto Shaw (Red Hill School), John Aitkenhead (Kilquhanity School), and the hugely influential Marjorie Franklin and David Wills, whose 1930s Hawkspur Camp laid the foundation for Planned Environment Therapy, described by Kasinski (5) as “probably the first unified model for the therapeutic community work with young people.” In his recent review of the history of therapeutic communities for young people, Kasinski (5) writes that “Planned Environment Therapy proposed that the child’s social needs could be addressed through the experience of shared responsibility within the community; their emo- tional needs through attention to relationships with staff members and through individual psychotherapy; and their educational needs through measures designed to increase motivation for learning such as volun- tary lesions and an emphasis on creative work.” P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002
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Wills shared Lane’s belief in the therapeutic value of love combined with shared responsibility. Love in this context meant that no matter how repelling a child’s appearance, habits or disposition he or she was seen as basically worthy of esteem and affection, and punishment was never to be used to inflict hurt or humiliation. Unlike Lane, Wills sep- arated the environmental and the psychoanalytic aspects of the ther- apeutic work, thereby creating a more contained and sustainable way of working. For many establishments this became the accepted model, while others developed a model that used the relationships within the large group as the therapeutic focus Therapeutic communities today can draw on the full range of knowl- edge and theories available about emotionally deprived and abused children from Winnicott, Rutter, Alvarez, Bowlby and Bettelheim, as well as the models for adult therapeutic communities. They have de- veloped ways of working that aim to provide the vital balance between the need for care and the need for control, between offering love and affection and setting limits. A recent issue of the journal Therapeutic Communities was devoted to papers on this topic. Rollinson, director of the Mulberry Bush School, described this as “real living and learning in the therapeutic community (where) so much of the work is in the “living alongside” the children, focussing on helping individuals and groups to learn to live with themselves and increasingly with one another” (6). The publication in 2003 of Therapeutic Communities for Children and Adolescents (7) provides further indication of the current conceptual and practical activity in this field in the UK, where The Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities also has an informative website at www.charterhousegroup.org.uk.
THE THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY APPROACH FOR PEOPLE WITH LONG-TERM PSYCHOSIS
The application of therapeutic community principles to work with the chronic mentally ill is in many ways the closest version of the therapeu- tic community modality to one of its most important predecessors, Moral Treatment. This was the term used to describe a model of care first de- veloped in 1796 by the Quaker William Tuke at The Retreat in York. In keeping with Quaker ideology, the mentally ill were accorded the status of equal human beings to be treated with gentleness, humanity and respect. This was quite revolutionary at the time, and The Retreat also gave priority to the value of personal relationships as a healing P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002
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influence, to the importance of useful occupation, and to the quality of the physical environment (8,9). Much of this early vision of a humane treatment for mental illness was lost as the 19th century progressed and the mentally ill were housed in increasingly large and impersonal asylums. Although the first half of the 20th century saw some attempts to humanize these institutions, it was not until the 1950s that the zeit- geist for the mentally ill began to change. Factors which can be seen to have contributed to this included the founding of the English National Health Service, the emergence of sociological studies of the toxic nature of large institutions, and the (re)discovery of a humane and egalitarian model of care in the shape of the therapeutic community experiments during and following the second world war. Right from its early days Maxwell Jones’ experiment at Belmont Hos- pital, just outside London, attracted the interest of psychiatrists in England and around the world. This way of running a hospital that gave equal status to the views of staff and patients, that encouraged patients to take the decisions about things that affect their daily lives, that gave responsibility to patients for many aspects of ward activities, appealed to psychiatrists faced with large hospitals filled with people living totally dependent, featureless lives in drab, overcrowded wards. Jones inspired them to think that when Boston psychiatrist Bockoven described “the heavy atmosphere of hundreds of people doing nothing and showing interest in nothing” in American hospital wards in the 1950s (10), it did not have to be this way. The concepts of “institu- tional neurosis” (11) and “total institution” (12) were emerging, and Europe and America were ready for a revitalization of the institutions that formed the core of mental health provision. One of the things noted elsewhere (13) is that the therapeutic community approach often seems to be embraced when a county is going through democratising changes: England at the time of the NHS forming, Israel in its formative years, Cuba in the early years of the revolution, Italy in the years following its heroic hospital closure legislation. It isn’t easy to overcome the inertia Bockoven found. It takes a charismatic and determined leader, and the following wind of a culture change. In its early days the therapeutic community approach was very much about changing organizations in the way vividly described by Clark (14,15). Staff who for decades had managed patients with a mixture of control and protectiveness, and sometimes abuse, and who had run the institution in ways that suited their own convenience, were suddenly asked to give patients responsibility, to consider the social and personal needs of patients and how these could be met, and to adjust their work P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002
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patterns to meet the needs of the patients. Anyone who has tried this knows the time and tenacity and politicking it requires, but also if they see it through, the satisfaction of seeing institutionalised patients grad- ually blossom and in many cases leave hospital for independent or shel- tered accommodation and a life in society. These were often the patients who were no longer ill or could now have their symptoms controlled by the newer medications, and whose continued hospitalisation was due at least partly to a loss of the skills and confidence to manage their own lives. However as these patients left hospital, those who remained were those whom today are sometimes referred to as the “difficult to place,” whose combination of treatment resistant symptoms and difficult per- sonalities keep them in need of 24-hour care. Thus although the cru- sading aspect of the therapeutic community approach to chronic mental illness is relevant where total institutions are still found, today there are other important applications in community-based housing projects for the long term mentally ill, and the work of community mental health teams. Small domestic households of between 5 and 12 residents live with staff support (either 24 hour or office hours depending on the level of need). For people with more integrated or recovered psychoses there are regular community meetings, service users help to draw up and review their own care plans and those of their fellow residents, and help in running the household. Where an individual’s symptoms prevent him or her from being actively involved, staff adopt a psychoanalytically informed style of “working alongside” the resident, carefully facilitating a degree of involvement through the relationship, seeking to avoid the twin defaults of leaving the resident isolated or doing things “for” the resident. (16) For the difficult to place patient Shepherd (17) has described the concept of the “ward in a house,” which is closer to the original model of Moral Treatment, and aims to combine the best features of hospital care and community-based residential care (18). Although the therapeutic community is primarily a modality of res- idential or daytime living environments, it has also been identified as an appropriate perspective for all community-based services. The em- phasis on respect for the individual, the recognition that service users have therapeutic skills, the importance of a containing environment and awareness of the potential for splitting within teams and organiza- tions have been noted as some of the contributions that the therapeutic community approach can make to the work of community mental health teams (19,20). P1: KEG Psychiatric Quarterly [psaq] ph259-psaq-482367 June 3, 2004 10:30 Style file version June 4th, 2002
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ACUTE MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS
Although therapeutic communities grew out of work with people with long term problems in their patterns of behaviour and relationships, they have also been developed in a number of countries for people suf- fering from acute or first onset psychoses, including England, Switzer- land, Finland and the United States. These have included both hospital admission wards and alternatives to conventional psychiatric services. In England a small number of psychiatrists used the opportunities created by the National Health Service to make over whole mental hospitals, including their admission wards. These included Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge, where Pullen developed a therapeutic commu- nity admission ward with an average length of stay of 17 days (21) and Littlemore Hospital in Oxford where Mandelbrote developed the Phoenix Unit as its acute admission ward (22). These and similar units adapted the core values of shared responsibility and democratised de- cision making to meet the needs and capacities of this client group, but maintained the practice of open communication, information sharing, informal relationships and, most importantly, staff self-examination within a culture of enquiry. In an acute psychiatric ward the therapeutic community is not the primary agent of change but creates a structure and atmosphere which can greatly enhance the quality of care in a number of ways: